George F. Will: Boundaries of the permissible

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

– Col. Nathan Jessep to Lt. Daniel Kaffee

“A Few Good Men” (1992)

“You,” said Jack Nicholson’s Jessep to Tom Cruise’s Kaffee, “have the luxury of not knowing what I know.” Viewers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf. Other informed persons, however, say viewers will be misled because the movie intimates (actually it is ambiguous about this) a crucial role of “enhanced interrogation” in extracting information useful to tracking Osama bin Laden.

In “A Few Good Men,” Col. Jessep insists that a harsh – and proscribed – training method ("Code Red") saves lives: “You f---in’ people ... you have no idea how to defend a nation.” “Zero Dark Thirty” explores the boundaries of the permissible when defending not a nation but this nation. Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, “When you lie to me I hurt you,” and proceed to do so.

The movie, which is primarily about CIA operatives, probably will make at least a cameo appearance in the confirmation hearings for Barack Obama’s nominee as the next CIA director, John Brennan. His 25 years with the CIA included the years when “enhanced interrogation” was used to squeeze crucial information from suspected terrorists.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the intelligence committee, and two colleagues have denounced the movie as “grossly inaccurate and misleading” for its “suggestion” that torture produced information that led to locating bin Laden. But former CIA Director Michael Hayden, while saying “there is no way to confirm” that information obtained by “enhanced interrogation” was the “decisive” intelligence in locating bin Laden, insists that such information “helped” lead to bin Laden.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey goes further: Khalid Sheik Mohammed “broke like a dam” under harsh techniques, including waterboarding, and his “torrent of information” included “the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden,” perhaps the one who is central to the movie’s narrative.

In 2007, Hayden ended the use of half the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, because American law, our understanding of the threat and our sources of information had changed. He also says, however, that such interrogations produced half our knowledge of al-Qaeda’s structure and activities.

“In the end, everybody breaks, bro – it’s biology,” says the CIA man in the movie, tactically but inaccurately, to the detainee undergoing “enhanced interrogation.” This too familiar term has lost its capacity for making us uneasy. America’s Vietnam failure was foretold when U.S. officials began calling air attacks on North Vietnam “protective reaction strikes,” a semantic obfuscation that revealed moral queasiness. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, who warned about governments resorting to “long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”